SALVATION

Susan Stafford: A Call Girl Calls on Jesus

By Tim SmithThe 700 Club

CBN.com
 “I grew up in a home where there was a lot of emotional, physical, and verbal abuse.”

As a child, Susan lived in fear. Her stepfather abused her and her sister. Susan’s mother was very unaffectionate.

“I always felt like I wasn’t loved. I often felt like I needed to reach out to be loved,” Susan tells The 700 Club.

When Susan was a teenager, she looked for love and meaning anywhere she could find it. She turned to drugs to fill the void: cocaine, marijuana, and alcohol.

“At that time, I also started to become very sexually active," she confesses. "I explored teenage pornography. So everything bad that could really happen in my life was happening at that moment.”

Susan admits there was no place for god in her life. In fact, she blamed God for all of her problems.

“I knew there was a God, but I never thought about Him. I never thought to even pray. At that point, I was angry at God. I thought, 'God, if You loved me, how could You put me in this situation?' What kind of loving God would do this to anybody?”

Susan left home when she was 17. Her step-father, though divorced from her mom, made Susan a unique offer.

“He said, 'I’ll tell you what. Why don’t you come live here with me? I have an apartment. You can take all the time you need to get a side job and your diploma. Everything will work out great, and you can decide what you want to do.'”

What seemed to be a good idea soon turned into a nightmare.

“He said, ‘I’ve got a better idea. You’re too pretty of a girl. Let’s do modeling.’ Now I was close to 17 years old, and to me that just sounded wonderful. I thought, ‘Great!’”

Susan was convinced she would have a new life with an exciting career in modeling.

“So he took me to the first call. I thought there would be a photographer in that house, but there wasn’t. There was no equipment. I had soon realized that my stepfather had made me a prostitute.”

But Susan could make a lot of money, so she let that numb her to the rest. This was the beginning of her new “career.”

Before long, Susan got pregnant, and had a son she named Colton. She also met a man named Craig, and they moved in together. Susan kept her job as a prostitute, but business slowed. Tthey were running out of money.

Susan recalls, “I decided that I needed to go to a bigger city. We would go up to Chicago, make a lot more money and be one big happy family.”

So they made the big move to Chicago. That’s when bad turned to worse. Susan was busted for prostitution, and put in jail. Her son was at home with a babysitter.

“There was no blanket. It was just a hard bench," she says. "There was no pillow. There was no water. They did not feed me. They gave me one piece of bologna with two pieces of white bread, that’s it. Nothing to drink.”

The passing hours seemed like days. All Susan could think about was Colton.

“I started to feel really dehydrated. I started to feel really hungry. But there was nothing that I could do about it. I felt so stripped of everything. I started to feel like there was no hope. Twenty-four hours turned into two days. Two days turned into three.

"There were many times I would call for the guards, but she would never come. These guards had no mercy at all for my situation. I was basically treated like I didn’t exist.”

Susan was desperate. What another inmate told her didn’t help… “'You’re never going to get out of here. There is no way out.'

“It was then that I broke. I started to become frantic. I just starting shaking those cell bars, and nobody would come, nobody would hear me. I got down to the floor, and I just said, 'Whatever You do, don’t take my son. I deserve this, but he doesn’t.'

" That was the first time that I cried out to God in years. I heard God say to me, ‘You’re the one who got yourself into that jail, but I’m going to get you out. You’ve got to come to Me. You’ve got to love Me. This is not My will for your life.’”

Susan couldn't understand why God would want her in the state she was in.

“I thought, 'But I’m so dirty. I’m so stained. I’ve committed adultery. I’ve slept with husbands. These wives don’t even know what I did.' I just couldn’t believe it. I felt so stained, and He said, 'I love you, and I want you to come to me, but it’s got to stop now.'”

While in jail, Susan accepted Jesus as her Savior.

“I thought, 'I’ll do whatever You want. Just get me to my son. Please let him be OK. He’s just a baby.”

God answered Susan’s prayer. After four days of trying to get Susan out of jail, Craig finally succeeded. Susan was released. Susan told Craig that she wanted to get out of the “business.” He left her, and Susan and Colton took a bus back to Florida.

“As I rode on that bus trip, Colton would just sit on my lap, and he would just look at me with those beautiful baby blue eyes," Susan recalls. "That was a very long 24 hours. But I knew that I had to change. I knew that I had to change.”

Three years after dedicating her life to God, Susan met Steven. They’ve been happily married for 13 years and have three children of their own.

“I wanted my marriage to Steve to be really special. I walked down the aisle wearing a white wedding dress. I thought God, 'I’m not worthy of this. People who walk down the aisle wearing a white wedding dress are virgins, and I’m far from that.' I heard God say to me, ‘You’re made as white as snow to Me.’”

Her days as a prostitute are distant memories now. But Susan will never forget what God has done for her.

“For a long time, I thought I wasn’t worthy, because I thought no one could have a past like me. Drugs, abuse, prostitution, teenage pornography... to me, it didn’t get any worse than that. And He has forgiven me. I have such a bigger sense of peace now that I can not even describe. As warm as the sun feels when you walk outside and feel that heat radiating on your hair, I can feel that warmth of God.

“No matter how much abuse you’ve had in your childhood, whether it was your step-father or step-mother or step-brother or step-sister or your biological parents, no matter how unloved you may feel, God is the only Father you will ever need. He can get you through every storm.”